Landforms and Resources:

North America

North America. It’s here:

Right now, we’re just concerned with the United States and Canada

• These are the Anglo American parts and have a similar culture as later we’ll discuss Mexico.

Varied landforms

• North America has a wide variety of landforms. It has mountains, plains, deserts, tundra, etc. Let’s look at a few.

The Eastern Lowlands

• Flat level land by the eastern and Gulf coastal areas.

The brown area along the coast is lowlands.

Appalachian Highlands

• Mountain chain that runs along the eastern U.S.

• The Appalachians are relatively old.

• Because they’ve been around for a long while, they’ve worn down and aren’t all that tall: they average 3,000 feet and the tallest peak, Mt. Mitchell in North Carolina is just 6,684 feet tall.

The interior lowlands

• Covers most of North America

• Relatively level

• May have been hilly at one point, but glaciers leveled it out during the last ice age

• Also carved out rolling hills and lakes

• Includes the Great Plains

• Also includes the Canadian Shield in Canada

• Huge area around Hudson Bay

Rocky Mountains

• Large western mountain chain.

• 78 peaks of 12,000 feet or more above sea level

• The Rockies are young and haven’t faced the extra 320 million years of erosion that the Appalachians have suffered, so they are much taller.

• The rain runoff and annual snowmelt from the Rockies also supply nearly ¼ of the U.S. with fresh water.

Winter

Summer

• Cold reflective mountain reservoirs. Makes you want to go there, doesn’t it?

Continental Divide

• All rivers flow either east or west. The continental divide is the line at which they go one way or the other.

Islands

• Canada has a nice assortment to the north in the Arctic Ocean.

• There’s also the Aleutian Islands tailing off of Alaska

• Did you know that during WWII, two small Aleutian islands at the tail end were captured and held by the Japanese?

• It was the last time a U.S. enemy invaded and held American soil.

• There are also the Hawaiian islands, but while they are part of the United States, they are not part of North America.

• All the same, they’re beautiful and I will use this excuse to put up some beautiful pictures of the islands.

Jurassic Park falls

Back to facts…

Resources

• North America is blessed with lots of natural resources. Among them:

• Water

• It’s got oceans or seas on four sides (Arctic, Atlantic, the Gulf, and Pacific) which is good for fishing and trade

• It’s got plenty of lakes including the…

• Great Lakes

• On a trivia item, note that Lake Michigan is the only great Lake that’s entirely within U.S. boundaries. The rest are shared with Canada.

• Nearly 20% of the earth’s fresh surface water is in the Great Lakes.

• It’s about 6 quadrillion gallons. That’s 6,000,000,000,000,000.

• It’s enough to cover the lower 48 states with 9.5 feet of water.

• That’s a lot of water.

And they look pretty from space.

• Rivers

• North America has a very large river system in the Mississippi-Missouri-Ohio

• The Missouri and Ohio rivers flow into the Mississippi, thus making them tributaries of the Mississippi

• North America also has lots of forests for timbers, lots of minerals, oil, natural gas, and a ridiculous amount of coal.

• The oil sands of Alberta are estimated to hold up to 180 billion barrels of oil, second only to Saudi Arabia’s 259 billion barrels.

• The trick is profitably getting the oil out of the sands.

• As for coal, the U.S. has so much that it’s estimated that even with increased demand, there’s enough to last us another 300-400 years.